Elizabeth Neumann worked for The Man Who Lost The Popular Vote. She served in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) during the first three-plus years of Trump’s (borrowed) time as president, first as deputy chief of staff and then, for two years, as the assistant secretary for threat prevention and security policy in the Office of Strategy, Policy, and Plans. She is a firsthand witness to the Trump administration’s utter failure to protect Americans from right-wing, white supremacist terrorism and violence.
For a recent article, Politico did an in-depth interview with Neumann along with Miles Taylor, chief of staff to DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and her successor, Acting Secretary Chad Wolf, and spoke to other relevant officials in law enforcement. The article is called “They tried to get Trump to care about right-wing terrorism. He ignored them.” Chilling. (Note the “g” at the end of the word. I’m using the adjective, not the verb).
As the Politico piece summarized:
For Neumann, her nightmare scenario of globalized white supremacist terrorism was coming to life. Meanwhile, the U.S. government was doing far too little about its own homegrown extremists — often "lone wolves" radicalized online by white supremacist websites and fueled by hostility toward immigrants and minorities. But White House officials didn’t want to talk about the rising domestic extremist threat or even use the phrase “domestic terrorism.” The administration’s relentless, single-minded focus on immigration enforcement — coupled with nonstop turnover on the National Security Council — constantly pulled senior DHS leadership away from everything else. And her ultimate boss, President Donald Trump, was part of the problem.
“At least in this administration,” Neumann said, “there’s not going to be anything substantive done on domestic terrorism.”
Here’s the testimonial Neumann recorded for Republican Voters Against Trump, in which she endorsed Joe Biden.
Taylor echoed the sentiments expressed by his former colleague. He worked to get his boss, Secretary Nielsen, to focus more on right-wing domestic terrorism.
“I said, ‘Look this is a pretty big deal right now, it’s getting serious, a lot of it’s racially motivated,’” Taylor recalled telling Nielsen. “‘I don’t think we are well positioned against it. We’ve got to do more, but it’s really got to start with the president.’”
Nielsen was willing to push but, as the Politico piece explained, she got nowhere. Through much of 2018, Taylor and Nielsen tried to get the White House to act by making the fight against right-wing racist terrorism a high priority within the government’s overall counter-terrorism strategy.
Taylor wrote a “dream draft” emphasizing everything DHS would want from the strategy document — including a focus on domestic terrorist threats, along with threats from radical Islamist terrorism and other foreign actors. [...]
“What ended up getting significantly dropped was all the stuff we talked about on domestic terrorism,” Taylor said. “We got a draft back from John Bolton that barely referenced domestic terrorism.”
In the end, the White House issued a final document on Oct. 4, 2018. It barely mentioned domestic terrorism, and when it did, it lumped a whole bunch of unconnected threats together, including: “racially motivated extremism, animal rights extremism, environmental extremism, sovereign citizen extremism, and militia extremism.” Right. Because animal rights activists are shooting up synagogues and Black churches, and killing Latinos en masse. As a reminder, here’s what the Center for Strategic and International Studies reported in June:
Far-right terrorism has significantly outpaced terrorism from other types of perpetrators, including from far-left networks and individuals inspired by the Islamic State and al-Qaeda. Right-wing attacks and plots account for the majority of all terrorist incidents in the United States since 1994, and the total number of right-wing attacks and plots has grown significantly during the past six years. Right-wing extremists perpetrated two thirds of the attacks and plots in the United States in 2019 and over 90 percent between January 1 and May 8, 2020.
As for the aforementioned Trump administration document and its broader counter-terrorism strategy, Taylor offered a final scathing assessment: “They said, ‘We’ll come up with a separate domestic terrorism strategy,” Taylor said. “Bullshit. They never did. It just got lost.” As Nielsen and Taylor explained, President Shitgibbon only cared about undocumented brown people coming across the Mexican border—looking for work, in virtually all cases—and showed no interest in combating racist white Christian terrorists born and raised in this country.
And here’s Taylor’s Republican Voters Against Trump video, which also includes an endorsement of Biden.
In recent months, the White House has bleated about antifa. Just this week, Chad Wolf and Attorney General William Barr even discussed taking the step of taking into custody, wait for it, leading Black Lives Matter activists—people who are organizing peaceful protests against police brutality. A New York Times piece laid out what Trump and his minions have been doing (and not doing):
The Department of Homeland Security started an effort a year ago this month to address domestic terrorism, white nationalist threats and other acts of homegrown violence, a major shift for an agency created after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to protect the country from foreign terrorism.
Today the plan to carry out that new mission remains stalled in a bureaucratic morass as clashes between protesters and counterprotesters have escalated to precisely the violent acts that the plan was supposed to address.
Instead, a new crop of Department of Homeland Security leaders, led by the confrontational acting secretary, Chad F. Wolf, appear to be doing the opposite of what had been promised. Far from cooperating with local governments and citizens to combat domestic unrest, particularly from the far right, they have joined President Trump in lashing out at American mayors and governors while deploying federal tactical teams to cities — often expressly against the wishes of the local governments with which they had pledged to cooperate.
Neumann slammed her former boss for playing up the supposed threat of antifa, which her department considers to be “low grade,” while ignoring the larger, more dangerous problem staring Americans in the face. What Trump and his top officials won’t do is “to come out and repeatedly and consistently criticize the white supremacist global threat.” She added, “It’s clear by labeling Antifa domestic terrorists, they’re just doing this for political purposes.”
It’s all about politics and elections. Trump has tried to scare voters—going back since the day he announced his campaign for president—about crime and Black and brown people. Now he’s pulling the same crap, talking about what a Biden presidency would supposedly bring. A recent poll from the highly respected folks at Quinnipiac found that’s not working out too well for the Orange Julius Caesar.
Do you feel more or less safe having Donald Trump as president:
Less safe: 50%
More safe: 35%
No impact: 14%
Would you feel more or less safe having Joe Biden as president:
Less safe: 40%
More safe: 42%
No impact: 16%
Biden himself made a powerful argument on Monday in Pittsburgh that he, not Trump, would be the one best able to make America safer because he will actually work against all types of violence, including that coming from white supremacists:
And now we have to stand against violence in every form it takes. Violence we’ve seen again and again and again, of unwarranted police shooting, excessive force, seven bullets in the back of Jacob Blake. Knee on the neck of George Floyd, killing of Breonna Taylor in her own apartment, violence of extremists and opportunists, right wing militias. … And to derail any hope and support for progress, the senseless violence of looting and burning and destruction of property. I want to make it absolutely clear, so I’m going to be very clear about all of this, rioting is not protesting. Looting is not protesting. Setting fires is not protesting. None of this is protesting. It’s lawlessness, plain and simple. And those who do it should be prosecuted. Violence will not bring change, it will only bring destruction. It’s wrong in every way. It divides instead of unites, destroys businesses, only hurts the working families that serve the community. It makes things worse across the board, not better. [...]
This president, long ago, forfeited any moral leadership in this country. He can’t stop the violence because for years he’s fomented it. He may believe mouthing the words law and order makes him strong. But his failure to call on his own supporters to stop acting as an armed militia in this country shows how weak he is. Does anyone believe there’ll be less violence in America if Donald Trump is reelected? [...]
I want a safe America. Safe from COVID, safe from crime and looting, safe from racially motivated violence, safe from bad cops. Let me be crystal clear: safe from four more years of Donald Trump. I look at this violence and I see lives and communities and the dreams of small businesses being destroyed and the opportunity for real progress on issues of race and police reform and justice being put to the test. Donald Trump looks at this violence and he sees a political lifeline. Having failed to protect this nation from the virus that has killed more than 180,000 Americans so far, Trump posts an all caps tweet, screaming, “Law and order,” to save his campaign. [...]
These are images of Donald Trump’s America today. He keeps telling you if only he was president, it wouldn’t happen. If he was president. He keeps telling us that he was president you’d feel safe. Well he is president. Whether he knows it or not, and it is happening, it’s getting worse. And you know why? Because Donald Trump adds fuel to every fire because he refuses to even acknowledge that there’s a racial justice problem in America because he won’t stand up to any form of violence. He’s got no problem with right-wing militia, white supremacists, and vigilantes with assault weapons often better armed than the police. Often in the middle of the violence at the protestors and aiming it there. And because tens of millions of Americans simply don’t trust this president to respect their rights, to hear their concerns or to protect them. It doesn’t have to be this way.
That’s right. It doesn’t have to be this way. But right now—thanks to the impeached president we’ve got—it is what it is.
Ian Reifowitz is the author of The Tribalization of Politics: How Rush Limbaugh's Race-Baiting Rhetoric on the Obama Presidency Paved the Way for Trump (Foreword by Markos Moulitsas)
